It looks like another dry Paris-Roubaix. It hasn’t rained in the race since 2002. Northern France is a wet place – riders from the region often move south in search of better training conditions – but as explored in a previous post here, early April is actually the driest period of the year for the area. Even the forecast for wind earlier this week looks to have faded away.
The Col de Turini summit finish, a big climb for March with over 1,000m of vertical gain and more than a 40 minute effort.
Ineos looks like the likely replacement sponsor for Sky. Touted in the British press two weeks ago as a possibility, tipped yesterday in The Cycling Podcast as a probability, things are firming up fast.
La Gazzetta Dello Sport reports that Ecopetrol could be the sponsor to replace Sky, that it could lead a collection of Colombian firms who would take over and turn Team Sky into a Colombian vehicle. It’s an oxymoronic name for a firm but as a Twitter correspondent explains it comes from Empresa COlombiana de PETROLeos or “Colombian Oil Company”.
A new year and the new season is fast-approaching. Here are a few things to look forward to, a mix of the old and the new and some will get the headlines and others will be quieter undercurrents.
Happy New Year? Who knows what 2019 will bring? Actually some things are predictable and here’s the pro cycling calendar for your organiser, phone or computer diary so you can at least know when the big races will happen. All of the major UCI men’s and women’s pro races around the world are included and below there’s a quick explainer on how to subscribe, the meaning of the UCI labels and more.
Here are the answers to the quiz. It was fun setting the questions, just to ask questions that don’t have answers one click away but also because several of them are what’s called hypophora, the act of asking a question just so you can give the answer and in this case to explore some of the odds and ends in the sport.
A Christmas quiz with 40 questions. Some are obvious, some are odd, many can’t be Googled and a few are fiendish and sometimes it’s the answers that raise more questions.
Having picked five highlights of the sporting year, now a look a few things that weren’t so enjoyable, hopefully in a constructive light rather than a long whinge…
